Men's rights
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Men's rights is a stream in the men's movement. It is closely related to the fathers' rights movement and began as a recognisable movement in the 1960s, largely as an outgrowth of men's divorce societies. (The earliest organization which has been documented is the United States Divorce Reform, founded in Sacramento, California, by Ruben Kidd and George Partis in 1960.) Its professed aim is to promote the health and well-being of all men and boys, as part of a general human rights, civil rights, or equal rights agenda. It is frequently concerned with wellness, economic fairness, and family law. There is no single unifying manifesto or organization which can claim to speak for the entire movement and the term is often used in various, even conflicting, ways.
Related streams of the men's movement are in particular:
- Fathers' rights focus on the relationship between fathers and their children and in particular family law.
- Masculism provides a counterpart to feminism and argues against legal constructs, reforms, or entitlements which deny men equal rights under the law on the basis of gender; there are conservative "traditionalist", "liberal", and libertarian strands.
Ancillary streams of the men's movement are
- Men's liberation an attempt to apply the principle of women's liberation to the issues facing men.
- The "mythopoetic men's movement", interested in self-help and psychological archetypes.
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[edit] History
The legal concept of rights is a complex one, with concepts of divine right, individual rights, natural rights and social rights beyond the scope of this article, which is primarily concerned with the legal standing, legal, civil and human rights of boys and men.
In the West the concept of rights developed, becoming increasingly egalitarian. Legal standing and human rights extended to other groups, to encompass all adult males, and women and children. but even today the laws of each country vary as to the de facto status of poor men, children, women and slaves, as reflected in civil, criminal and family law.
Prior to 1995 the men's movement was predominantly a reactive and disorganized movement that received little attention or recognition. The American Coalition for Fathers and Children was founded in 1995 by mature activists such as Stuart A. Miller, and Dianna Thompson. ACFC founded the shared-parenting movement and organized the largest protests in the history of the men's movement, the largest held in over 225 cities around the world on father's day, 2001 in the "Bridges for Children" campaign.
The majority of the men's movement now holds that no-fault divorce is a human rights violation of men's natural right to be a parent, an unconstitutional removal of men's natural right to be a part of the family and legitimate members of society, and an unconstitutional violation of children's natural right to be raised by both parents unless a parent is found unfit.
[edit] Structure
Like most social movements, those concerned with men's rights comprise a wide variety of individuals and organizations, both united and divided in various ways on specific issues including the mistreatment of men in the media, gay rights, the abortion debate, family law and false rape allegations. Some groups are formally organized or incorporated, while others are casual alliances or the work of a few individuals.
Some Men's Rights leaders embrace pro-feminist gay men's organizations and activley work to include them. The Mankind Project, for example has a sub-group called Rainbow Warriors, for its gay, transgendered, bisexual and questioning members. The organization provides a specialized training course called "Issues and Isms", or I&I, which teaches tolerance of men of differring sexual orientations, racial backgrounds, religious affiliations, et cetera.
Although the vast majority of men's rights leaders and activists are men, there are many women, including those in significant positions within the movement. For example, Sue Price in the Australian Men's Rights Agency has been at the forefront of activism there. Naomi Penner was a women's rights activist in the 1960s who later helped to create the National Coalition of Free Men in America in 1981. B.N. Saraswati founded one of the earliest Men's right group in India. Dianna Thompson, the first Executive Director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children founded the Second Wives Crusade, which gained popularity very quickly, and later became part of the True Equality Network operated by Terri Lynn Tersak. Self-labeled feminists, such as Wendy McElroy, regularly advocate for men's rights.
Although most men's rights advocates are from the developed world, they form a diverse group, which include both singularly religious and atheistic individuals, as well as those from the left, right, and center of politics and every echelon of society. Significantly, however, the Men's right movement caught strength in India with Purush Hakka Sanraskhshan Samsta, of "Save Indian Family".
The majority of those who participate in the men's rights movement do so because they perceive unfair social discrimination against men, particularly in social policy, state and federal funding, and criminal, civil and family law.
[edit] Issues
Within the larger context of human rights, men's rights advocates are concerned with many of the same general issues as proponents of women's rights, only with special attention to the role of men and boys as victims and participants.
[edit] Education
In recent years, girls in the United States have tended to perform better at all educational levels[1].
[edit] Employment
Employment law is another area of concern, with such problems as unequal treatment around parental leave, retirement age, and pension entitlements. They also assert sexual harassment policies are de facto directed against the male style of inappropriate sexual behaviour in the workplace, while ignoring the female style of inappropriate behaviour in the workplace. Others assert that many sexual harassment laws restrict men's basic freedoms, and cause men to be constantly on edge. They express anger towards the fact that a man telling a joke or simply referring to a co-worker by a nickname is grounds for dismissal or lawsuits.
[edit] Family
Family law is one area of keen interest among men's groups. Fathers' rights advocates say there is a systematic bias against men in child custody matters. The treatment of husbands in divorce cases, whether or not there are children, is another issue.
[edit] Health
Health areas addressed by the men's rights movement include:
- Male-only military conscription
- Male circumcision
- The disparity in the spending on men and women in the healthcare system. For example, in Western countries, women live longer than males by a margin of about seven years on average; but at the same time there are many more health centers catering for women's special health needs than for men's special health needs. [2] As another example, funding for prostate cancer research in the US and across the Western world is significantly lower than for breast cancer, which is less frequent.
- Suicide rates are significantly higher for males of all age groups
- Workplace deaths and injuries occurs at a higher rate for men[3][4]
- For domestic violence, advocates cite government statistics that show that in 15% to 38% of the cases of intimate partner violence the victim is male. They argue that the real number is likely to be higher, since male victims are significantly less likely to report abuse than female victims, due to social stigmatisation[citation needed]. They also assert that the percentage of shelters for battered men should make up a respective percentage of all shelters. The National Coalition of Free Men has sued several women's shelters with the goal of allowing battered men and their children to be admitted and to receive assistance from shelters.
[edit] Media portrayal
Another issue of concern is the perceived anti-male bias in the media. Men's rights activists claim that men are portrayed unfairly on television, radio and in newspapers and magazines. They claim that not only does the media not pay serious attention to men's rights issues but that men are portrayed in a negative light compared to women, particularly in advertising.[citation needed]
[edit] Refugees
In Australian immigration policy a distinction is regularly made between women and children (often treated erroneously as equivalent to "family groups") and single men. The details are subject to current debate and recently failed legislation (August 2006) in the Australian Parliament. But for example in one famous recent case, the Minister for Immigration, Senator Amanda Vanstone, determined as follows concerning Papuan asylum seekers (all forty-three of whom have since been accorded status as refugees): "The single men on the boat would be sent to an immigration detention centre, but families would not be split up and would be housed in facilities in the community"[5]. The discriminatory treatment of single women (routinely assumed to be members of some family) and single men evident in such a practice is rarely examined in the Australian media.
[edit] Social security
In some societies there is legislated discrimination against males in provision of social security. In Australia, for example, a woman over 50 years of age may obtain a Widow Allowance[6] approximately equal to a pension if, after turning 40, she becomes widowed, divorced, or merely separated from a spouse (who may be a de facto spouse). She must have "no recent workforce experience", but she can easily qualify for this well after the loss of her partner by going through a period of underemployment. There is no similar allowance for men. In Australia, Some of these discriminatory arrangements (including also women's earlier qualification for Age Pension, etc.) are being legally phased out.
[edit] Criticism
As with many social movements, some of the strongest criticisms of men's groups comes from other groups and activists. Feminists or pro-feminist men criticize a perceived ignorance of sexism, male privilege and power. They also allege that men's rights advocates spend much of their time fighting women's rights rather than working positively for all men. Some men's rights advocates respond that they are not ignorant of such issues, but dispute the methodology of many findings or assert there is a cause for gaps other than sexism. Critics counter that men's rights advocates are guilty of the same faulty-methodology and substitution of sexism for logic accused of other groups.
Pro-feminist critics such as Michael Flood of the Australian pro-feminist men's organization XYonline paint the men's rights movement as the most extreme part of the broader men's movement [7]. According to this view, most men's rights advocates have joined the movement as the result of negative personal experience during a divorce or custody battle. Many advocates do not dispute this claim, but argue that this is due to the fact that many men do not realize legal discrimination until after they have experienced it themselves. The same may be said of the majority of women in the pro-feminist groups.
In general, all movements claim to address issues of concern to men and to remove institutional and societal discrimination against males. Some argue that feminism was originally an egalitarian ideology and that it has strayed from the goal of gender equality and begun to support the discrimination and abuse of males. Some, like Darren Blacksmith[8] and Chris Key[9], however, condemn the entire history of the women's rights movement. The men's movement, as a whole, seeks equal rights for all people. The men's rights movement is often equated with the masculist movement, but these terms have never been homogeneous, well-defined, or stable over time, so the relationship or synonymy remains unclear.
[edit] Wages
- See also: Male-female income disparity in the USA
A classic example is equal pay for women and the supposed "wage gap." Research and statistics are used to argue that this is not sexism, but reflect that men are either required, or are more willing and/or able, to work in dangerous conditions, staying in a field longer (thus becoming more experienced employees), being more likely to relocate for higher pay, and numerous other factors.[citation needed] Critics of feminism point out that the methodology used by feminists to gather their wage gap information was flawed. Lenore Wietzman's study, (the one most often cited by feminist books for wage gap information), simply compared the aggregate reported earnings of men in the US to that of women. This ignores the professions chosen and the number of hours worked, as well as unclaimed income such as unclaimed day care and tips from jobs like waiting on tables. Warren Farrell's book Why Men Earn More identified many reasons why he believes men earn more money than women. When accounting for all of these factors using the same data Weitzman used in her report, the wage gap was less than 2 cents on the dollar.
Feminists and other critics, however, point to statistics that demonstrate dangerous and physically demanding attributes do not amount to higher pay and therefore the hypothesis does not have enough data to support the reason for the pay gap.[10] Feminists, like social-psychologist Carol Tavris, labels the "solutions" put forth as sexist since the suggestions to close the gap falls entirely at the feet of women, that it ignnores what her research argues is a societal tendency to devalue "women's work", and that it forces women to live their lives on the terms of men. She holds it is unfair to neglect to consider a man's role and actions at all, such as a father who does not contribute to child-care as much as the mother to the detriment of only her worklife, or the fact that only women can get pregnant. She suggests it marginalizes issues that women are more likely to face and uses the male experience as default. She also contends that when such issues are taken into consideration it is frowned upon as "special treatment" simply because it isn't something men experience, or used to justify the mentality that women are inferior to men.
[edit] Violence
Critics also accuse men's right advocates of ignoring, trivializing, and/or defending male violence. In response, some men's rights advocates say they "don't disagree that some men rape"[citation needed], but state that some figures put out claiming that 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 women are raped are exaggerated, or that feminists beliefs[citation needed] such as "every man is a potential rapist"[11] are inherently sexist. They also suggest that women can be as violent as men in intimate partner relations, often citing Dr Martin Fiebert's bibliography[12] and Straus and Gelles findings.[13]
Michael Flood, while acknowledging violence against men by women does take place, accuses men’s rights advocates of deliberately using "free-flowing numbers" without taking into account the contexts in which violence occurs. He says advocates neglect to consider when violence against a man by a woman can be in self-defense or an attempt to leave an abusive, potentially violent situation. He adds that they use the terms ‘violence’ and ‘abuse’ interchangeably without defining either; and that they fail to distinuguish between heterosexual and homosexual couples. Controversially, he states that Men's rights advocates ignore the "unreliability" of the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS).[14]. Murray Straus (co-creator of the CTS) refers to such claims about the CTS as 'erroneous'.[15]
Richard Gelles (co-creator of the CTS) describes the claim by "the right of center" that: "Women Initiate Violence as Often as do Men" is a "significant distortion of [his] research". One that "conveniently" ignores that "no matter what the rate of violence or who initiates the violence, women are 7 to 10 times more likely to be injured in acts of intimate violence than are men." As found in surveys conducted by himself and Murray Straus as well as the Bureau of Justice Statistics.[16]
America's national media watch group, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), agree that violence against men by women takes place, but suggest that 'poor understanding', and the use 'out of context,' of the Straus/Gelles studies accounts for the difference in numbers alleged by some men's rights advocates and those from the American government's Bureau of Justice Statistics.[17]
Critics including Michael Flood cite statistics suggesting that of reported assaults by a partner, men are more likely to call the police, press charges, and keep them than women (Schwartz, 1987; Rouse et.al; 1988; Kincaid; 1982). The National Institute of Justice Report on Intimate Violence states that: Men living with male intimate partners experience more intimate partner violence than do men who live with female intimate partners. Approximately 23 percent of the men who had lived with a man as a couple reported being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked by a male cohabitant, while 7.4 percent of the men who had married or lived with a woman as a couple reported such violence by a wife or female cohabitant. These findings, combined with those presented in the previous bullet, provide further evidence that intimate partner violence is perpetrated primarily by men, whether against male or female intimates.
Critics accuse men's rights advocates of defending male abuse, often by alleging it is justified due to a perceived "unfairness" men face, and even rallying behind abusers. For example, a spokesman for The Men’s Confraternity, after a Perth man gassed to death his three children and himself in 1998 after his visitation was shortened by Family Court, voiced (perpetrator was) probably a decent, hard-working man who was pushed too far by the Family Court. Critics like Michael Flood allege men's rights advocates pre-emptively accuse women who allege abuse from men of lying and scheming, and, in regards to abuse women and children allege against men, alarmist exaggeration of false accusations by men's rights advocates yet do not apply the same standards to the numbers of male (by female) victims men's rights activists claim exist. Michael Flood has contended this does existing male victims of domestic abuse a disservice.
[edit] See also
- Antifeminism
- Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them
- Fathers 4 Justice
- Father's Rights
- List of family separation research articles
- List of men's rights organizations
- Marriage strike
- Masculinity
- Masculism
- Men in skirts
- Mythopoetic
- Paternal rights and abortion
- Parental leave
- Pro-feminism
- Feminism
- Radical Feminism
- Feminazi
- Radical Faeries
- Seduction community
- Shared parenting
[edit] Significant writers
[edit] References
- ^ Yupin Bae, Susan Choy, Claire Geddes, Jennifer Sable, and Thomas Snyder, "Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women", Education Statistics Quarterly, U.S. Department of Education, 2000
- ^ http://health.utah.gov/opha/publications/hsu/9903suicide.pdf source
- ^ http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/tables/table11e.htm
- ^ http://www.springerlink.com/content/l0h5l77h16395wpv/
- ^ "Vanstone refuses to return Papuans", Sydney Morning Herald, 26 January 2006
- ^ http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/payments/qual_how_wid.htm
- ^ http://www.xyonline.net/Respondingtomen.shtml
- ^ http://www.cooltools4men.com/
- ^ http://www.mens-rights.net/commentary/chriskey/index.htm
- ^ http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/Oct/wk1/art02.htm
- ^ http://www.equityfeminism.com/archives/years/2000/000016.html
- ^ http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm/
- ^ http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CTS21.pdf
- ^ http://www.xyonline.net/husbandbattering.shtml
- ^ http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CTS44G.pdf
- ^ Richard J. Gelles, "Domestic Violence Factoids" University of Rhode Island Family Violence Research Program, 1995
- ^ http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1247
[edit] Bibliography
- Save the Males by Richard Doyle, 2006, ISBN 978-1411696334
- The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell, 1993.
- Women Can’t Hear what Men Don’t Say: The myths that divide couples and poison love by Warren Farrell, 1999.
- The War against Boys: How misguided feminism is harming our young men by Christina Hoff-Sommers, 2000.
- Who Stole Feminism: How women have betrayed women by Christina Hoff-Sommers, 1994.
- Spreading Misandry: The teaching of contempt for men in popular culture by Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young, 2001.
- The Legal Subjection of Men by Ernest Belfort Bax, 1908.
- The Fraud of Feminism by Ernest Belfort Bax, 1914.
- The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege by Herb Goldberg, 1987.
- Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice by John Stoltenberg, 1989.
- Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly, 1990.
- Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi, 1999.
- Men Freeing Men: Exploding the myth of the traditional male by Francis Baumli, 1985.
- Flood, Michael: Backlash: Angry men's movements in: Rossi, Staceay E.: The Battle and Backlash rage on. 2004, XLibris Corp., ISBN 1-4134-5934-X, S. 261-287 [1]
- Flood, Michael: Men's movements in: XY magazine, vol. 6. 1996 [2]
- The Man's No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet Earth by Marc H. Rudov, 2004.
